Date of Award
12-1-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.F.A. in Creative Writing
First Advisor
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Second Advisor
Melissa Ginsburg
Third Advisor
Ari Friedlander
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
My poem, “möbius,” is a dialogue between body and voice. It can be read in seven different configurations: 1. from the top, spanning the entire stanza; either flat or as a torus; 2. folded in half (ibid); 3. by giving the folded poem one-half twist to form a möbius strip.
In Celestial Mechanics, where “möbius” takes place, I pursue a line of poetic inquiry that uses physics to interrogate bodily materiality on contemporary and queer terms. I respond to Judith Butler’s 1990 text, Gender Trouble, and utilize both gravitational physics and metaphysical poetry to craft not just a queer poetics but a queer spacetime that expands beyond the two-dimensional page. After encountering an early edition of Herbert’s “Easter Wings” in the Brotherton Special Collections at the University of Leeds, I worked with different structures to shape the textual body of my sequence and reworked metaphysical conceits inside a contemporary queer spacetime. In “möbius,” I work with three-dimensional space to join the speaker’s body and breath on a single, continuous surface. Drawn to Judith Butler’s assertion that the “soul is manifest on the surface of the body,” my work considers the construction of gender identity in both two and three dimensions. Can a queer identity also be internalized or felt? “I hold a question / to show them pulsing”: I work to define a queer poetics that probes the limits of Butler without trying to undo gender performance itself.
I have engaged with different poetic forms (ghazal, villanelle, gram of &s, and my invented marginalia form) to examine the topological constraints of a queer identity. In “ghazal,” I consider the unit of the line, and the repeated incantation of “body,” hoping to uncover its ontology.
Likewise, as I was revising “genesis,” I excavated the villanelle form after noticing the disjunction between the refrain, “you are light,” prosody, and fragmented lineation in my initial drafts. My work also makes use of the slash, alongside the use of contrapuntal and multidimensional forms to disrupt the gender binary and create a queer temporal progression through time: “blessed / the angel names Jacob / you are a man / I am an angel unfallen / in the cold.” I want to open the space between the knowingness and hypotheses—questions swirling inside lines as shadows. I disrupt the obvious and ordinary by pushing the boundaries of poetic form and scientific inquiry by looking to both interior modes of queer expression and the expansiveness of the cosmos.
Recommended Citation
Chand, Alexandra Gita, "Celestial Mechanics" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3507.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3507